Wednesday, 31 August 2011

Complete Change of Tack

Complete change of tack here. Less serious but this might ask questions of you. Yes you. The person sitting reading this on your screen.

Back in the mid seventies I was about to leave high school and set of on my journey into the big wide world. One of the last things I was asked to do, along with the rest of the English class I was part of, was to write a short essay on religion for the Minister of a local church which was about to celebrate a major longevity anniversary. The best essay would win a prize of some description.

Pretty straight forward? Well for me no, not at all. Like most young adults of my age at the time I’d been brought up going to church, Sunday school, BBs, and youth clubs. I’d sort of had enough of that sort of thing by then even although the church I was involved with then was generously allowing me, and my heavy rock band, to practice in the hall as long as we played at the occasional Sunday service. But I digress.

I took my seat in the room with the rest of the A stream 6th year students in a pretty bored state of mind. A few sheets of blank lined paper were given to each of us and then it was time to be silent and we had an hour to write.

For some reason I decided that I wasn’t going to write about the sort of religion I’d been involved with. I decided I’d write about a wee theory I’d been considering for a few months. I don’t have the original text as it was handed in but I’ll try to re-create it here.

One of life’s perpetual questions is where do we come from and what happens to us when we die. No one has come up with an answer to that. People have had various stabs in the dark based on religious beliefs but no one has tangible evidence, which would provide an answer.

We are born, various things take place and after a number of years we die. Fairly simple to grasp and we look upon this as a journey from A to B all lined up, neat and tidy. It’s like looking at a map. You choose point A where you start and you go along the route which takes your to your destination point Z. There maybe detours, side trips, unintentional wrong turnings etc. but the route is logical and one step leads directly to the next. Understandable? Yes?

At this point I went down, shall we say, a different route. We expect that every second of time is consecutive. That is one is followed by two is followed by three and on and on for all of our lives. We can’t go back, we can’t re-live even a few seconds and we can’t add more seconds in a guaranteed manner. We also believe that once a second is past, it has been used and is gone forever.

What if every second we live is alive forever? That’s loopy? Isn’t it? Can you disprove it though? No. Do I have proof for this? No, but if time travel was possible and we travelled back ten years, we’d find everyone alive and doing things they did ten years ago. Long shot? Yes but the principle is worthy of consideration.

Next step then, is that if every second of everyone’s lives is there forever it would mean that we were immortal. We live forever within the seconds we use. If all our seconds are alive for all of time perhaps our immortality is not lived from A to Z but is lived as our consciousness jumps back and forward to any and all points of our lives in a random order. The timeline or lifeline we inhabit is there forever. The only rule is we can’t step out of it… yet.

Now thinking back to the Minister who was handed the essays. I imagine that he sat down at his desk and started to read through them. Then he comes to mine. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall. I’m sure it must have stopped him in his tracks. Maybe he was annoyed. Maybe he offered up a prayer for the heathen who blasphemed to such an extent. Maybe he laughed. Maybe you are doing one or more of these right now.

And I didn’t even mention quantum physics. But I just might give that a whirl. Soon. Whadda ya think?

What is a “dead” certainty is that we all know we have to make the most of every second we have. So why are you still sitting there. Get up! Go and do something amazing. Remember to write it up and post though even if it is a bit bizarre, or a lot.

16
comments:

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame has a similar view, I'll try to pass it on.

Basically, time doesn't exist. What does exists are infinite slices of reality, like infinitely slender polaroid photos, time doesn't move forward in a linear way, our consciousness merely jumps between these alternate realities endlessly quickly according to the choices we make giving us the illusion of moving forward.

But we're not really, that is just how our feeble mind perceives it. So we don't exist as flesh and blood, our consciousness flits between infinite universal rrealities.

Take from that what you will. As far as I can see, life is what it is, it's chemistry and random chance. When you die that's it, you get to experience a peace hitherto unknown but here is the punch line, your dead so not conscious to appreciate it.

Mmm, cheery. ;-)

(The Scott Adam thing is in his book The Dilbert Future, its the last chapter, the entire book is a really good read.)

Great example Pa. I thibnk I'll need to look that book out and read it.

I quite like the vision of the workld that was in the Matrix. It looked spot on to me.

I think Einstien was working on the principle that mathematice could prove that therev was no such thing as time. He also said that space and all the galaxies in it made it impossible for time to exist.

Interesting post tedious. I was watching that series with Prof Cox a few months ago and he was explaining his view on time. Basically we only have 'time' because we can watch it's passing. The sun rising, trees changing colour as we go from summer to autumn etc. When the Universe eventually cools down and there's total darkness then time will stop as you will have no way of monitoring the passage of time. And no one to monitor it. No change in temperature of the Universe as all the heat will have gone etc. It didn't really explain things to me as the Universe is supposed to be infinite so how can it ever totally cool down ?

Time is elastic: the good bits go too soon and Religious Indoctrination lessons, for example, drag on and on until one actually gains a working knowledge of eternity. It was called Religious Studies at my school until the teacher overheard how RS was pronounced by his underwhelmed pupils.

I rather enjoyed the weekly assemblies petem because I was in the orchestra and we could waste a whole half hour after they'd finished by having to pack up instruments etc. Sometimes a few of us would manage a little pop or jazz session if our music teacher was in a good mood. It was Monday mornings after all. :)

Interesting post,TT.Religion and human history is a strange thing.All through history we seem to have not just God, but Gods, quite a few of them. the Greeks had some that flew around Mt Olympus in fiery chariots.In fact, when one looks at the evidence, the stories when told by the people of the times sound like myth, but look at the stories through modern eyes and our ability to accomplish some remarkably similar feats, with modern science, what is the real story of Gods. And the Egyptians,pyramids and all that was claimed for their god/kings.Ever watch the Sci-fi series Stargate?It made me wonder, "what if"! When the ancient stories and anomalies are looked at together, they look more like an ancient would report a modern day event,as he saw it without understanding it. In that light, the stories don't look so fantastical.

Interesting post,TT.Religion and human history is a strange thing.All through history we seem to have not just God, but Gods, quite a few of them. the Greeks had some that flew around Mt Olympus in fiery chariots.In fact, when one looks at the evidence, the stories when told by the people of the times sound like myth, but look at the stories through modern eyes and our ability to accomplish some remarkably similar feats, with modern science, what is the real story of Gods. And the Egyptians,pyramids and all that was claimed for their god/kings.Ever watch the Sci-fi series Stargate?It made me wonder, "what if"! When the ancient stories and anomalies are looked at together, they look more like an ancient would report a modern day event,as he saw it without understanding it. In that light, the stories don't look so fantastical.

"What if every second we live is alive forever? That’s loopy? Isn’t it? Can you disprove it though? No. Do I have proof for this? No, but if time travel was possible and we travelled back ten years, we’d find everyone alive and doing things they did ten years ago. Long shot? Yes but the principle is worthy of consideration."

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

Hypotheses and theories MUST be open to refute.

You can't prove a negative.

Odin (or Aphrodite - insert favourite deity here - although I guess most folk are atheist about the Greek/Norse/Mesopotamian gods amongst countless others who have fallen out of fashion) exists.

Disprove my assertion.

You cannot.

Your time-travel hypothesis throws you into a perhaps unforeseen problem: it denies that "Free Will" is true.

Of course, only folk without having studied the subject would say "Free Will" is true, as the laws of physics would have to change constantly... they don't. In fact, cause and effect could not exist with "Free Will."

Again, you have made statements which can't be disproven. Thus the statements are unfalsifiable and thus meaningless.

And don't get me started on so called-consciousness. Mentioning quantum physics seems to be the new way of sprinkling magic-quantum-fairy-dust because the answers we have so far don't fit our preconceived notion of self.

Someone once asked me this. If the universe was to contract, as in reverse then start again (assuming we believe the big bang theory) would everything happen exactly the same way again?

Even if the universe as is thought will naturally stop expanding then begin to contract, when it does eventually achieve a similar level of gravity for a big bang, it'll go pop again and everything starts all over again, even then; will things happen exactly the same way?

Hi Tedios, just wanted to add some facts to an interesting though ultimately metaphysical discussion.

I might not have any thought, I might be a "philosophical zombie" that appears to mimic everything one thinks is conscious but I am not.

You would not be able to tell the difference. Neither would this bundle of complexly put-together bits of matter my brain thinks is an "I".

I am pretty sure I do not have any thoughts. Just brain events which feel like they are things that belong to the entity known as me. And those events have causes I am not totally aware of, and never will be.

Anyway, it's a moot point if - which is highly probable (and testable to some degree, weirdly) - we're in a simulated universe... :-D

I do love all these bonkers, brain-aching ideas. Particularly the ones with evidence. This Universe methinks will always be too mad and inexplicably weird that it will forever be beyond our ken.

Hopefully, Post-Humanity will have better brains and more knowledge. If I was a post-human in the 22nd Century, say, I'd run a simulation to find out how we got to this point. ;-)